Open-Source Collaboration to Increase Productivity
It'S the first comprehensive open source collaboration solution built to demanding enterprise J2EE software standards, say developers.
Addressing a growing need for an open, standards-based platform for enterprise collaboration, the open source project is attracting attention across a broad range of industries including manufacturing, financial, technology, health, government and education. This open source software can dramatically lower the total cost of ownership when compared with other major proprietary collaboration frameworks.
"Large enterprise users tell us they are in need of a viable open alternative to the leading proprietary collaboration platforms," said Eric Olinger, Akiva CEO. "It is not primarily a cost issue as much as an innovation and openness issue. Most of the innovation in collaboration (blogging, wikis, etc.) is happening in the open community, not in software vendor R&D labs."
Silk is designed to provide seamless integration of collaborative applications such as email clients, IM programs and meeting applications while providing a centralized web portal into an enterprise's content and the collaboration surrounding it. As a framework for "collaboration enabling the enterprise", documents and applications are presented along with the related collaboration such as participants, discussions, surveys, meeting notes and emails. This presents team members with a complete picture of the status of projects and provides the context for smart collaboration. Within this context, team members have immediate access to the information and collaboration tools they need rather than searching through "islands" of various collaboration applications.
It competes functionally with applications such as IBM's WorkPlace framework and the Microsoft Sharepoint technology. "By leveraging the advantages of a truly open development process, Akiva is confident that the product will be able to meet or exceed the capabilities of these closed architectures within the next 12 months," said Steven Niles, Akiva CTO. Silk is built on industry standard technology (J2EE, JBOSS, MySQL and Linux among others) and is being distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL) -- the most popular open source software license. As of today, the same software is also available under a commercial license, along with support, from Akiva for enterprise customers.
Basic features include:
-- Web and/or Email based threaded discussions
-- WebLog publishing (Blogging)
-- Collaborative content publishing (Wiki)
-- File sharing (via web and/or WebDAV)
-- Document versioning
-- Polling, Voting and message ratings
-- User rankings and profiles
-- User home pages and subscription
-- Collaboration viewed in context of documents & applications
-- User presence/location and message routing
-- XMPP Based IM and Text chat support
-- RSS support
-- JavaBeans and Web Services (WSDL/SOAP/XML) API access
-- Integrated Help and online documentation
-- Major J2EE application servers and databases supported
-- LDAP support
www.akiva.com
www.silk-project.org.
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